Monday, November 21, 2011

Social Networking and Community Participation Websites

As we all know Facebook is now the most visited website on the Internet, and a number
of companies such as Adidas, Red Bull, Starbucks, have millions of fans on their Facebook
pages. Social Network is today’s topic on what I’m going to talk about because in this economy
almost everything is technology and now a days applying for jobs is online. The business world
currently has a complicated relationship with idea of social networks. Some companies embrace
them wholeheartedly and encourage employees to use them to reach out to customers. Other
companies ban employees from using them at work, particularly networks such as facebook that
weren’t originally designed for business use LinkedIn. Businesses now use several types of
social networks, including public, general purpose networks, public, business oriented networks
and variety of specialized networks. A significant majority of consumers now want the
businesses they patronize to use social networking for distributing information and interacting
with customers and companies that aren’t active in social networking risk getting left behind.
            With hundreds of millions of people expressing themselves via social media, you can be
sure that smart companies are listening. Sentiment analysis is an intriguing research technique in
which companies track social networks and other media with automated language analysis
software that tries to take the pulse of public opinion and identify influential opinion makers.
Companies use social networks to find potential employees, short term contractors, subject
matter experts, product and service suppliers, and business partners. Members can recommend
each other based on current or past business relationships, which helps remove the uncertainty of
initiating business relationships with complete strangers. Businesses don’t invest time and money
in social networking simply to gain fans. The ultimate goal is profitable, sustainable relationships
with customers, and attracting new customers is one of the primary reasons businesses use
networks and other social media. However, the traditional notions of marketing and selling need
to be adapted to the social networking environment because customers and potential customers
don’t join a network merely to be passive recipients of advertising messages. They want to
participate to connect with fellow enthusiasts to share knowledge about products, to
communicate with company insiders, and to influence the decisions that affect the products they
value. According to Amitha Amarasinghe he states “Intrinsic motivation refers to motivation
embedded in the action itself rather than from external rewards such as money or recognition.
Intrinsic motivation comes from the pleasure of completing the task satisfactorily. On the other
hand, extrinsic motivation refers to the motivation coming outside the individual. These are
external factors such as money or recognition. For example, a person might engage in a certain
action because of the monetary benefits that he could gain by completing the action. A social

network is a social structure made up of individuals or organizations called "nodes", which are

tied connected by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friendship, kinship,

common interest, financial exchange, dislike, sexual relationships, or relationships of beliefs,

knowledge or prestige. In its simplest form, a social network is a map of specified ties, such as

friendship, between the nodes being studied. The nodes to which an individual is thus connected

are the social contacts of that individual. The network can also be used to measure social capital  

the value that an individual gets from the social network. These concepts are often displayed in a

social network diagram, where nodes are the points and ties are the lines.

            Social network analysis has now moved from being a suggestive metaphor to an analytic

approach to a paradigm, with its own theoretical statements, methods, social network analysis

software, and researchers. Analysts reason from whole to part; from structure to relation to

individual from behavior to attitude. They typically either study whole networks, all of the ties

containing specified relations in a defined population, the ties that specified people have, such as

their personal communities. The shape of a social network helps determine a network's

usefulness to its individuals. Smaller, tighter networks can be less useful to their members than

networks with lots of loose connections to individuals outside the main network. More open

networks, with many weak ties and social connections, are more likely to introduce new ideas

and opportunities to their members than closed networks with many redundant ties. In other

words, a group of friends who only do things with each other already share the same knowledge

and opportunities. A group of individuals with connections to other social worlds is likely to

have access to a wider range of information.